The Secret Diaries of Juan Luis Vives

by Tim Darcy Ellis

  The Secret Diaries of Juan Luis Vives

  Copyright © 2020 by Tim Darcy Ellis

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Tellwell Talent

  www.tellwell.ca

  ISBN

  978-0-2288-3437-3 (Hardcover)

  978-0-2288-3436-6 (Paperback)

  978-0-2288-3438-0 (eBook)

  Table of Contents

  Cast of Characters in Order of Appearance

  Prologue

  The Eyes and Ears of the King of Spain

  A New World

  For Henry the King or for Catherine the Queen?

  End of Days

  Acknowledgments

  Dedicated in loving memory to

  Nancy Rice Saunders (1921 -2020)

  But who is there who surpasses Vives in the number and quality of his studies?

  Sir Thomas More, 1523

  He has an extraordinary philosophical mind.

  Erasmus, 1524

  He was the godfather of psychoanalysis.

  Gregory Zilboorg, 1941

  The only blemish on his character was his Judaism.

  Lorenzo Biber, 1947

  Cast of Characters

  in Order of Appearance

  All characters are historical, unless otherwise stated.

  In Flanders

  Juan Luis Vives (1493–1538) was a Spanish humanist philosopher born in Valencia to Jewish converso parents. He fled Spain at the age of seventeen and was educated in Paris. He taught in Bruges, Oxford, and London. He was a close friend to Erasmus and Thomas More. He was tutor to Princess Mary and counsellor to both Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon.

  Johannes Van der Poel (fictional character) was one of Vives’s students from Bruges, Flanders.

  Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) was an English lawyer, statesman, and confidante to both Vives and King Henry VIII and was Lord Chancellor (the king’s chief advisor) from 1529–1532. He was the author of Utopia and was an opponent of the English Protestant Reformation.

  Louis de Praet (1488–1555) was Grand Bailiff of Ghent and Bruges and later Ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, to England.

  Álvaro de Castro was a friend and confidante to Juan Luis Vives. He was from Burgos, Spain. Vives wrote of him, “I loved him like a brother.”

  Bernardo Valldaura was a Jewish cloth and diamond merchant from Toledo, Spain, who fled to Bruges.

  Clara Valldaura was the wife of Bernardo and first cousin to Vives’s mother, Blanquina March.

  Marguerite Valldaura-Vives (1500–1548) was the eldest daughter of Bernardo and Clara. She married Juan Luis Vives in 1523.

  Maria Valldaura was the second daughter and middle child of Bernardo and Clara.

  Nicolas Valldaura was the only surviving son of Bernardo and Clara and became a physician in Bruges.

  In England

  Margaret Roper (1505–1544) was described by Erasmus as “the most intelligent woman in England.” She was the eldest daughter of Sir Thomas More and his first wife, Jane Colt. She married William Roper.

  Alice More was the second wife of Sir Thomas More and stepmother to Margaret Roper and four adopted children.

  William Roper (1496–1578) was a lawyer and husband of Margaret. He was also a biographer of Sir Thomas More.

  John Claymond (1468–1537) was a scholar and early naturalist, translator of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, and first president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

  Thomas Linacre (1460–1524) was a humanist scholar and personal physician to Henry VII and Henry VIII, as well as tutor to Princess Mary before Vives.

  Princess Mary Tudor (1516–1558) was the daughter of King Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. She was a pupil of Vives at Oxford and London.

  King Henry VIII (1491–1547) was King of England from 1509 until 1547.

  Queen Catherine of Aragon (1485–1536) was Queen of England from 1509 to 1533. She was the daughter of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, authors of the Alhambra Decree (1492), which ordered the expulsion of the Jews from Spain.

  Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (1473–1530) was Cardinal and Archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor (1515–1529). He raised a subsidy tax on the nobility, which reduced taxes on the poor and helped pay for the establishment of Corpus Christi College. At one time, he was a strong supporter of Vives.

  Reginald Pole (1500–1558) was one of the surviving members of the Plantagenet dynasty and later became the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury. He was a fierce opponent of Luther and of the re-admission of the Jews to England. He was the son of Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury.

  Maria de Salinas, The Lady Willoughby (1490–1539), was a Spanish noblewoman and confidante/lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon. She was married to Baron Willoughby of Eresby. Diana, Princess of Wales and the present Duke of Cambridge are among her descendants.

  Anne Boleyn (c. 1501–1536) was lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon and later the second wife of Henry VIII. She was educated in the court of Queen Claude in Paris, where she first met Vives. She was Queen of England from 1533–1536.

  Mary Boleyn (c. 1499–1543), sister of Anne Boleyn, was at one time mistress to Henry VIII and lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon. The Princess of Wales was one of her descendants.

  Benjamin Elisha (fictional character) was a Portuguese Jewish émigré living in the street known as Houndsditch just outside the walls of the city of London.

  Sarah Elisha (fictional character) was the daughter of Benjamin (above).

  Antonius Moyses was an Italian (secretly Jewish) musician who played the viol at the court of Henry VIII.

  Edward Scales was an English Jewish inmate from 1503 until 1527 of London’s Domus Conversorum, a refuge for repentant Jews.

  Iñigo López de Mendoza (1476–1535) was Spanish ambassador to England from 1526 to 1529. He was imprisoned alongside Vives on the orders of the king.

  Prologue

  Jacques le Boeuf, electrician, was pushing his luck. He had a job to do and only an hour to do it.

  It was one of those cold November nights when darkness fell quickly, like a stage curtain at an unexpected interval in a play. It seemed as if all the students and most of the lecturers had simply vanished as if, save for him, the whole College of Bruges was deserted. He’d been told to do whatever it took to finish the job in Professor Benitez’s room, for there were funding interviews that had to go forward the following morning.

  “Merde,” he said as he got the brief. This was one of the college’s medieval buildings, where the job was never simple.

  “If only they could have told me earlier,” he muttered, raking his deft fingers through curly black hair. And so, with faint tremors of frustration, he began moving a bookcase to the side. It was then that he saw the problem: crumbling, damp plasterwork and cloth-wrapped wires had almost rotted through. No wonder Benitez kept getting “blacked out.” The wires must have been placed there long ago, probably before the Nazis came through Belgium in World War II. What stories of occupation and liberation, he wondered, would the room be able to tell?

  “Sacre bleu,” he said as he dropped the chisel down a cavity at the back of the plaster. “S
top rushing, you fool,” he said to himself. The soccer match was starting in thirty minutes.

  The tool room was locked, and he’d neglected to bring the key. Without the chisel, how was he going to get the job done at all?

  He rushed around the room, knocking over piles of papers and books. “Slow down, Jacques,” he told himself. He carefully picked up the books and papers and sat in Benitez’s squeaking antique chair with its cracked leather arms and put his head in his hands. It was then that a thought arose like a cobra from a snake-charmer’s basket. Could he possibly do what he’d promised not to? To retrieve the chisel, he’d have to use his blunt hammer and punch deeper into the ancient wall.

  He leapt up from the chair, got the hammer, and punched out an extra piece of plaster. Droplets of sweat formed on his brow as he hammered. Cracks appeared, and then a chasm opened; a pile of plaster lay around his crusted brown leather boots.

  He couldn’t stop now.

  The chisel had tumbled far back into the wall cavity. After some groping, he found it, but there was something else there, too. It felt like a wooden box, about the size of an encyclopaedia. It was wedged tightly into the cavity behind the plaster wall.

  Jacques reached farther back, his breath coming in quick bursts. At last he got a grip on it and, inch by inch, breath by breath, he twisted it until it was free.

  “Mon Dieu,” he said as he brought it to the light.

  It was a simple wooden box with an ill-formed star scratched on the surface. An old wasp’s nest, gummed to the lid, disintegrated under his breath. Then, like a child not quite knowing what to do, he shook the box. Something inside rattled and rolled.

  How long had the box been there? Was it hidden during World War II? He saw the star clearly now: the Star of David, ever so faintly. Jacques knew that there had been Jews in Bruges who perished during the war, so perhaps this box contained the lost treasures of a family that had been transported to Auschwitz or Dachau.

  The professor’s wood-framed clock, something that could have come from Dickens’s London, ticked loudly and broke his train of thought. After all, every minute spent here was another minute of soccer that was wasted. Perhaps he would just throw the box in the skip with the plaster and be done with it.

  He quickly fixed the wires with gaffer tape and swept up as best he could. He’d return the following day to re-plaster the wall, but at least the electrics would be working for the interviews. He dragged the bookcase back to hide the hole in the wall. Not knowing what to do with the box, he grabbed it and put it under his right arm. He slammed the heavy oak door shut, turned the key with a resounding clunk, and was gone.

  * * *

  The next day, Jacques, who usually avoided the academics, watched closely until the last interview was done. He then went back to the office of Professor Benitez and knocked lightly on the door. At Benitez’s command, he opened it and, with his head down, approached the professor.

  “Sir, I have something to give you,” he said, stuttering as he held up the box. ‘Truth is, I made a botch of that job last night, and I found this box stuck behind the wall.”

  “Made a botch of the job?” Benitez, the famous linguist, replied. He laughed like a beloved uncle. Jacques had assumed the professor would be furious with him or at least threaten him with disciplinary action. But he’d underestimated the kind-hearted Benitez, with his two-tone beard. When he saw what Jacques had in his hands, he jumped up like a man half his age. He pushed aside a sea of books that surrounded him and walked to Jacques.

  “What on God’s earth do we have here?” Benitez asked with a smile.

  He gently took the box from Jacques’s rough hands, and with his own soft white fingers, he drew it to his nose. Jacques watched as the professor put the box down and unhooked the brass pin, green with corrosion, and opened the lid. They both peered at the contents as if looking into an ancient tomb.

  Inside lay a small book with a withered brown jacket. The professor lifted it and found a bundle of papers beneath it, as well as another book and tightly rolled parchment. In the corner of the box was a ring with a gold Star of David engraved on a blue enamel face.

  “It’s just that the plaster gave way behind that very wall, and the box was there,” Jacques explained. “So, I took it.”

  Benitez leaned over and kissed Jacques le Boeuf on both cheeks like he was his own son. He then swore Jacques to secrecy.

  * * *

  Benitez abandoned his other work, even the funding interviews, while he spent the next two months in isolation at the Musea Brugge. It took him that long, with a team of conservators, to understand what Jacques had discovered. Much of the writing in the book was in code. It was tiny, as if it had been written under a magnifying glass. Some of it was in Spanish, some in Latin, some in Arabic. The latter part was written almost entirely in poor English. The small parchment was carefully unrolled and identified as a sketch by Hans Holbein of England’s Sir Thomas More. The gold ring was unique, for it was in the English Tudor style, and yet it had the Star of David on its face.

  It was at the end of the second month that Benitez realized that he was examining the secret writings of one of Bruges’s great men. The books and parchment were indeed what he’d hoped they would be: the lost voice of one whose secrets were precious and beautiful. If revealed at the time, such secrets could have implicated hundreds or perhaps even led to civil war. These were the writings of a man truly ahead of his time, someone who had strived against insurmountable obstacles to make the world a better place. He had become the tutor of Princess Mary Tudor and was the confidante of both Catherine of Aragon and King Henry VIII, playing the impossible game of double agent.

  It was a year before the writings were published. Benitez was torn as to how he should translate them, for the man who had written the ancient diaries hated lofty academic speech. He prized clarity, and Benitez was determined that the world would hear this man’s authentic voice.

  One year to the day Jacques le Boeuf discovered the box of secret writings, there was a press conference at the Musea Brugge.

  “We have been blessed,” Benitez broadcast at the press conference, “with a lost portrait of England’s Sir Thomas More and a unique gold ring. But more importantly, we have the secret diaries of a great renaissance scholar, the friend of royals and the most secret of all Jews: Señor Juan Luis Vives.”

  Part One

  The Eyes and Ears of the King of Spain

  Bruges, Flanders, is in the hands of the Catholic King of Spain, Charles V. Martin Luther would change all that, as would the peasant rebels determined to liberate themselves from the shackles of the Spanish overlords. It has been thirty years since the expulsion of the Jews and Moors from Spain. The armies of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman are approaching Vienna.

  Here lives the Spaniard, Juan Luis Vives. He is thirty years of age and engages with the greatest minds of his day: Erasmus of Rotterdam and Sir Thomas More of England. He is a humanist and humanitarian, a teacher who talks of the duty of all to “repair the world”; he lectures on the rights of animals and advocates literacy for all women.

  But he has a secret that he must keep hidden at all costs.

  Here are his diaries.

  22 November 1522

  With a slap on the table and a clap on my back, Johannes, the dazzling student, slams down this leather-bound book of nothing. It’s full of blank vellum pages. It has a cover of filigree spirals, and the spirals form patterns like little eyes and ears that seem to follow me around the room. He, the lanky blond, says to me, the swarthy master, that I should write all my secrets here. As if I could do that! As if I could write my own death.

  But those words—perhaps they’ve opened Pandora’s box, for here I am, contemplating writing all my secrets. He must have seen the look in my eye, for when I looked up, I found him smiling with boyish dimples and a summer glint in his eye. He turned around an
d breezed out like a court harlot off to a better job.

  So, diary, now that you’re here, uninvited, what do I write? Maybe I should ask what do I not write? What secrets do I not tell? Perhaps I should ask you the questions, hoping that I’ll get answers to the unfathomable. Let’s start then. Why do they mean us harm when we mean no harm to them? Why do they hunt us to the very corners of the earth? And one more, please: Why, if we say we’re good Christians and go to their churches, do they still try to root us out? But these questions, if they were found written here, would be enough to see me chained to the…

  So, you force me, diary, to write in codes and ancient tongues on this cold November day with pine logs spitting and hissing in the grate. Here I am, the exile, sitting in the red leather-backed chair with its cracks and dimples moulded to my bent spine. What’s here? I barely notice as a rule, but there’s the smell of parchments and wines, of bits of spice and a lap-full of crumbs that I’m too lazy to brush away.

  My gaze is drawn through the diamond-shaped windows into the cobbled street below. Pretty girls are running with hoops and sticks. The frayed ribbons in their hair go back and the hoops go forwards. I chuckle to think that the girls I stared at when I arrived here nine years ago are now teaching the game of hoops to their own daughters.